Ask HN: What would you like to learn about bio startups? - <AUTHOR> I made a comment a few weeks ago on the dearth of resources for learning about bio startups that a few people seemed to agree with.  I wanted to follow up on that topic and see what information would be most helpful for those who want to learn about the sector.
As a side project, I've been offering free career development programs / resources to help PhD students and postdocs learn about bio startups and meet people from the startup / VC community.
I would like to create resources for non-scientists as well (I myself am a non-scientist but have worked in the space for eight years and love it), and some of the students have expressed interest in helping with this effort on a part-time basis while they look for jobs or start their companies.
So what would you be most interested in learning about bio startups?
For context, all of the students / postdocs have PhDs (or are getting PhDs) in biology, chemistry, bioinformatics or related fields from top-tier universities and have demonstrated interest / experience in startups.  There are ~100 students in the network, all in the Bay Area.  I don't have a science background but have worked with bio startups my whole career as a venture investor, venture-backed founder, and employee / consultant at startups and big tech companies.
The format of the services will obviously depend on what resources would be most helpful.  I've heard requests for consulting engagements, recruiting of technical talent, part-time support for founders who don't have life sci backgrounds, deep technical dives / diligence, help with deal flow, exploring startup opportunities around a theme, educational content on biology and chemistry, industry overviews, etc. <comment><USER2> I studied bioinformatics and enjoyed it tremendously. I unfortunately (for my science career) got sidetracked with a startup and never finished my degree, but I think I have a good enough understanding of the field, and I'd love to try my hand at contributing something useful.

What I have almost no idea of is what sort of product might actually have a chance in a commercial context. I'm not even talking about VC-startup territory, but something that's both interesting, and could potentially achieve "Ramen profitability".

From what I remember, startups were mostly in Pharmaceutics, requiring vast amounts of money and expertise. And bioinformatics within those companies seemed to mostly involve groundwork in the data cave. PyMOL comes to mind as an exception.

Any pointers would be appreciated!

<comment><AUTHOR> Your question is an interesting and common one, although most people ask about VC-fundable ideas vs boostrapped ones. We might do a project soon exploring opportunities in this area, but my feeling now is that there is a lot of interest in using ML / informatics to find new targets, find new ways to drug validated targets, and speed up lead optimization. the biggest bottleneck is creating scalable pipelines for getting high quality, annotated data. a good way to create these targeted pipelines is by starting with a targeted therapeutic / biological hypothesis and building the informatics platform from there

It is true that most startups are in biopharma / drug development, and that field has performed incredibly well the last five years. In the last 18 months or so, "bio-IT" has emerged as an area of significant interest. This is a pretty amorphous term (one VC described it as "a biotech startup whose CEO wears a hoodie, not a suit") that ranges in meaning from turning drug development into an engineering discipline [1] to using AI to identify novel targets or drug candidates (see recursion pharma as a good example of this type of company), to mining genomic and transcriptomic data in search of novel drug targets

a few things that might help frame the opportunity:

an MIT-affiliated venture creation firm released a good paper last year on the applications of AI to drug dev [2]

there was a post here a few days back on using AI to predict protein folding. tools like that would be quite useful

tools to predict tox / PK/PD of compounds is an area of interest

platforms to analyze various -omics data to identify disease associated pathways and targets are interesting

"virtual screening" tools have been an early area of research, either based on biochemistry / biophysics and structural data, or AI / ML approaches

however the holy grail is using informatics to find new validated targets. the failure of big late stage studies due to targets that worked in mice but not in humans is by far the biggest driver of the cost of drug r&d

my favorite example of using bioinformatics to find validated targets is the Regeneron Genetics Center. regeneron is a "big biotech" company with one of the best reputations for early stage r&d in the field. their approach is "lower tech" but quite clever and effective

RGC started with a clever therapeutic hypothesis that 1) gets the most "juice" out of each piece of data and 2) enables the targeted optimization of the data collection and analytics platform. the thesis is basically: drugs can really only target one molecule at a time, so you want to find single genetic mutations that are correlated with very dramatic clinical phenotypes (rather than a "signature" of a bunch of small effect sizes); rare phenotypes can inform generalizable clinical strategies (if one rare mutation results in, say, super low LDL in a tiny subset of patients, then you can probably target that mutation to reduce LDL in any patient); you need scale to find these rare and actionable mutations (so focus on lots of cheap WES vs higher resolution but more expensive WGS)

they dont use advanced AI or ML, but get cheap, high quality data through partnerships with health systems, have a high throughput, highly automated genomics core, and an informatics infrastructure that makes it easy to do the kinds of queries they need. many firms start with data and then search for therapeutic applications, but this has proved inefficient and ineffective, and RGC's approach stands out as very clever and scalable.

[1] [https://a16z.com/2017/12/14/second-bio- fund/](https://a16z.com/2017/12/14/second-bio-fund/)

[2] [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b630ae9de4bb6c5c0b6...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b630ae9de4bb6c5c0b6907/t/592cdd922e69cfe0047c0ab2/1496112532453/NestBio- ArtificialIntelligenceAndComputationalBiochemistry.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for taking the time to write such an extensive answer. Do you have a link to your other writing, or the project you mentioned in submission?

<comment><AUTHOR> The website for the program is newbio.tech. I've written a few articles on the site and might write up something on bio-it in the next month or so

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where the money goes. Seriously. We routinely see Angel and Series A rounds raised by Professors with little business experience that are 5-10X the amount an early stage AI company would get.

I'd really be interested in seeing the blueprint for how to bootstrap a successful synthbio startup starting with a single, garage-sized DNA foundry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't seen data for 2017 AI funding, but biopharma startups raised $12B in 2017 (AI startups raised $5B in 2016).

The large rounds are due to 1) amazing exit environment attracting tons of capital and 2) no growth in number of funded startups in the last decade. More money chasing fewer deals = larger $ per deal

From what I see professors don't typically don't join companies, but rather stay in academia and advise re the science. The management team is generally comprised of a team of serial entrepreneurs or 20-30 year big pharma veterans. Most startups are seeded in house by a cadre of biotech VCs

Will write a post about the blueprint for these startups, but in broad strokes it's 1) $1-5M seed round to make sure the academic work is reproducible, generate IP and derisk core hypotheses with a few "killer experiments". If that looks good, there will be a $20-50M (or even $100M+) series a that is typically designed to get through human proof of concept in phase 1. This is when the exit window opens, and the exit window these days is big. Should be noted that most of these rounds are tranched

There are several Bruce booth blog posts that walk through this in more detail. Bruce is a partner at atlas venture, a leading early stage biotech fund, and he's one of the few biotech VCs who blogs. Don't have specific links offhand but can find a few if interested

It's tough to bootstrap in biopharma because you don't generate revenue basically ever. You could theoretically sell assays or reagents or something to get revenue to support the real r&d but it's often preferable to get VC money. The best exits require $10-20M minimum</comment></comment>


Office space in NYC - <AUTHOR>

Dear Hacker News community,
I recently co-founded a tech startup in NYC. My co-founder and I just rented some great space in soho and we're looking to turn it into a vibrant, thriving startup hub. Sorry if this is ad-like, but I feel like the benefit of this place to startups in New York outweighs the spaminess of the submission.
The space is an entire fully furnished loft that is currently divided up into bays that can easily fit 3 to 4 people each. The price is $875 for each 150 (actual) sq ft. bay. I've been looking around at prices for desk space in the city, and this package is definitely one of the best deals in NY. Great for startups because of the month to month lease and all inclusive amenities. My co-founder and I will also be working out of the space. Here are the details:
-Exact location is 447 Broadway (Broadway and Grand) in soho (supposedly "Silicon Alley") which is extremely close to the 1, 6, N, R, Q, W, J, M, Z subways -Each bay is 150 (actual) sq feet and are $875 each. There are two smaller bays at half of a full bay ($437.50) -Month to month lease. You would need to pay 1st and last month up front with 1 month security -Really cool soho loft with a great vibe, 16 ft. ceilings, 2 bathrooms, elevator access -All utilities (including free internet) included, free use of communal conference room -Great deli right down stairs that has everything, and great food close by (chinatown and little italy) -24 hour access -Free cleaning and trash removal 3 times per week -Use of kitchen with sink, microwave, fridge, tea/coffee
I think the benefits of this place go beyond the cost if we can fill it up with tech startups... it would have a great motivating community aspect that everyone would benefit from.
Please get in touch if interested and tell your friends!
Chris Dickson email@example.com <comment><USER2> There are some other similar options for startups that have impressive price points & amenities.

From my research, there is:

Green Desk in DUMBO - <http://www.green-desk.com/> Great for environmentally conscious startups, and awesome office environment and amenities.

Sunshine Suites in Tribeca and Noho - <http://sunshineny.com/> Mixes techies with non-technology startups. Big networking opportunities.

TechSpace in Chelsea, Union Sq., and West Village - <http://www.techspace.com> The pricey option, but I think they've been around for awhile.

And then there are other options like co-working (for a price, or for free like at Jelly - <http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInNYC>), which is much less expensive, trading your services for desk space at a random company, or searching craigslist for open desks.

I have no experience with any of these choices (except I've been to a few Jelly coworking meetups). I spend my time at the fine New York Public Library system, punching away at the keys on my laptop.

<comment><USER3> Sunshine Suites is a lot more cramped. Have you been in there? The place is set of cubicles set up with portable 5 foot tall "walls". You and a friend can get 2 adjoining desks for $800 a month, and that might be perfect for what you need. But you need to deal with the noise of the communal space.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Sunshine Suites is cramped(but most the cubes are empty) unless you work with garyv in the back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are the rules RE: living in the space?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's zoned as commercial so I think that means you can't live in it. Also there are no showers, so that might not be great for your personal life

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a more informal vein, I just got some space in Soho and am looking to host a semi-regular hackathon. I have done these in Philly in the past, and it has worked as follows. A bunch of people get together for a full day on the weekend, enter with a goal of accomplishing a side project (either a small new project or a piece of a larger project), and we all work from early morning til late night, then get some good food and drink afterwords. At previous hackathons I've gotten iPhone apps and simple web apps built, and they have been great fun. Sometimes it's just motivating to be around a bunch of people who are working something out of passion for creating, and this is a good way to harness that vibe. Get in touch with me if you're in NYC and interested in this sort of thing: @kortina on twitter or the same on gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah we'd love to something like this. We have set our own personal hackathon weekends to get little unrelated side projects done, but the more the merrier! And we're in soho

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let me add direct Gmaps link [http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=447+Broadway,+nyc&ie=UTF8&ll=40.720323,-74.000996&spn=0.00158,0.002253&t=h&z=19) :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Something you may want to consider, I worked at an Ad Agency in NYC and they rented out some of their desks and stuff cheap to startup. A lot of NYC companies will cut you a great deal because they don't need all the space, you cost them nothing, we even hosted their dev servers on site since we had a pretty decent connect. (they may have paid for some of the connect since we did have to firewall them off from our local lan segment).

Call around anywhere you can think of that may have extra space like say the financial companies etc. You would be surprised at what having some good product people and tech guys around can do for a business, they may even swap consulting for space.

</comment><comment><USER9> Photos would really help to sell this.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are completely right, can't believe I forgot. I used Posterous, here's the url:

<http://chris-kv7gn.posterous.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We just took space at <http://www.42west24.com/>

Month-to-month, space is great and not super crowded

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice area for sure. So are the bays not secured by actual walls ? From the pics , it looks like a lot more than 150 sq ft.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, it feels like more as well, but I guess we're used to people exaggerating in NYC. It also might be the open nature of the office

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds good but a little pricey even for Manhattan.

<comment><AUTHOR> I put 150 sq feet just to be completely honest and accurate, and that is actually the exact square footage of each space. If I did it like other listings and included the huge common areas, I could list it as 315 sq feet, but that just seemed lame to me. If you're at all interested I would suggest taking a look because it's got a great unique open feel to it and the text description doesn't do it much justice. If the price is the problem, I'd love to know where you would care. Thanks, Chris</comment></comment>


Solar Sinter: a solar-powered 3D printer that sinters sand into 3D objects - <AUTHOR> http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solar-sinter/ <comment><USER2> This is incredibly fun. I also love how the guy is dressed as an urban hipster in the desert and appears to use a pair of socks on his hands to pick up the (presumably) hot pieces to remove them from the device.

I'm sure those pieces will fetch a good price in a classy art gallery (which makes me wonder, "engineering gallery"? good concept?).</comment>


Amazon Is Working on a Device That Can Read Human Emotions - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/amazon-is-working-on-a-wearable-device-that-reads-human-emotions <comment><USER2> from voice*

a critical point</comment>


AthenaX – Uber Engineering's Open Source Streaming Analytics Platform - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/athenax/ <comment><USER2> Hello, Haohui here. I'm one of the developer of AthenaX. I'm really glad that the project attracts so many interests.

Before AthenaX most of our real-time analytic pipelines were on Samza, which to to some extent can be seen as predecessor of Kafka Stream.

The migration from Samza towards Kafka Stream might seem more natural, and we actually took a very close look on Kafka Stream and we have decided to move towards Flink, given that:

(1) Kafka Stream lacks of important features like exactly-once delivery and distributed consistent snapshots. They are essential to support use cases that require high fidelity.

(2) SQL is a must-have feature in order to empower our users, many of which are non-technical, to run large-scale streaming analytics in production. Kafka Streams provide no support for that. Arguably the Kafka Streams provide simple APIs -- Simple APIs themselves are insufficient to bring the analytics applications to production. You can't ignore continuous integrations and deployment, monitoring, etc., especially many of our users come from non-CS backgrounds.

(3) It seems that the Apache Flink community is more open and committed compared to the Kafka community, particularly on the SQL side. We have collaborated with Data Artisans, Alibaba and Huawei. All parties above, as well as us are committed and equipped with adequate resources to bring SQL to respective customers.

<comment><USER3> How do you see this compared to Prestodb, which also provides SQL for Kafka topics? Being able to join Kafka data with other tables seems like a useful benefit of Prestodb?

<comment><USER2> It would reduce the latency of data but we have not tried in production.

Given that Kafka neither provides secondary indexes nor organizes data in columnar format, Presto essentially have to somewhat scan through the Kafka topics to execute the queries, resulting a lot of disk I/O.

Our Kafka infrastructure handles more than one trillion messages per day and guarantees second-level latency SLAs. Reading aggressively could easily saturate all the I/O bandwidths of the nodes and leads to outages. We actually had several incidents in the past when we did backfills. So I'm more conservative on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nevi-me Interesting project! I only got to know about Apache Calcite a few months/weeks ago, but it seems like it's becoming a de facto way of supporting SQL on analytics products. I can think of Dremio [1] as an example.

From an implementation perspective, I wonder how AthenaX will compare to the Apache Beam SQL DSL [2] (I haven't tried it out, still learning DoFn, ParDo, etc.). Beam is also leveraging Calcite, with the partial difference that it runs* on Flink amongst others.

I think it's safe to say that the streaming analytics ecosystem remains interesting and exciting! Hope I'll be able to try out AthenaX, congratulations on the release.

[1] [https://www.dremio.com](https://www.dremio.com) [2] [https://github.com/apache/beam/tree/DSL_SQL](https://github.com/apache/beam/tree/DSL_SQL)

<comment><USER2> I'm not fully familiar with Apache Beam SQL DSL so I can't really provide anything insightful.

But yes streaming analytics is a very exciting area. Your feedbacks are appreciated.

<comment> nevi-me I think it'll only be released in the next minor version. We currently need to build from source to try it, so I'm waiting for next version. I'm still learning the Java API, which is a lot for a few hours here and there.

In the blog post, you talk about running AthX on YARN, so am I correct in saying that I might not be able to run it on single-machine mode? I'd like to try it out (SQL window functions are easier to understand than Beam Java ones).

Maybe Gitter or a public Slack channel could help, more users will have queries that aren't suitable for HN nor GitHub issues.

<comment><USER2> You can definitely start a single node Flink-on-YARN cluster. That's how all the integration tests are set up.

What do you think of posting the questions on the mailing list [1]?

[1] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/athenax- users](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/athenax-users)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is super awesome!

Although it's slightly frustrating how closely named it is to the Amazon Athena[1] service. Which _also_ is a SQL-based analytics service, but quite a bit different than Uber's project.

[1][https://aws.amazon.com/athena/](https://aws.amazon.com/athena/)

<comment><USER2> Agree :-)

Proposals on names are always welcomed.

<comment><USER5> What about River? Looks like there is an R package and an abandoned Apache project that use the name, but maybe not that confusing given context.

<comment><USER6> It's a stream processing language:

[http://hirzels.com/martin/papers/spe16-river.pdf](http://hirzels.com/martin/papers/spe16-river.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Okay...

Tribute Tributary Brook Flow Rapid Affluent Alluvial Aquaduct Niagara Iguaza Aquifer Flood Flashflood Headwater Tailwater Lotic Hydro Meander Outfall Spillway Watershed Weir

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Putting "X" and "Athena" together just makes me think of the Athena Widgets (Xaw) toolkit for X11.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks like an amazing piece of software! I have a couple of questions:

\- Does it (out of the box) support mapping JSON messages on a Kafka Topic to a table accessible from SQL?

\- How would you support the following use case: run SQL queries on one or more Kafka Topics and expose the results in (near) real-time through a JDBC supporting BI tool? I assume you'd use, AthenaX to run the queries and store the results in a standard RDBMS like PostgreSQL?

<comment><USER2> (1) Yes. AthenaX provides a thin wrapper of KafkaJsonTableSource[1] out-of- the-box. As long as you specify the schema it should be good to go. (2) Your guess is correct. Internally we have AthenaX streaming data to MemSQL, Pinot or MySQL to support the use case you described. Some of them go through the JDBCTableSink [2], the others go through a customized connectors. AthenaX is designed to allow plugging in connectors when required.

[1] [https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink- connectors...](https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink- connectors/flink-connector-kafka- base/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/streaming/connectors/kafka/KafkaJsonTableSource.java) [2] [https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink- connectors...](https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink- connectors/flink- jdbc/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/api/java/io/jdbc/JDBCAppendTableSink.java)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting project although cant say I am happy to see SQL being used in Streaming Systems like this. In my last two jobs I had to write frameworks and tools to enable "Data Scientists" and "analysts" to write production jobs and problem I have run into with exposing SQL to this class of user is that every job end up being its own special snowflake with deeply nested SQL with custom UDFs mixed in for good measure. Due to "unique" nature of each its significantly increases the support and maintainability cost. I have to come the conclusion that a typesafe api with map/filter/flatmap is much better API to expose that Stringly typed SQL. I am curious to know whether Uber is running into similar support issues?

<comment> nevi-me My experience teaching some graduates in a BI shop. SQL is more common, and tools that support SQL tend to be used better.

I've "taught" them how to use Spark, but being a team of varying prior experience, the Scala API meant them learning Scala, the Python one was a bit better, but they did much better with the SQL DSL.

Regarding your concern re maintainability: UDF's tend to be the problem, I'm also curious to know re their support issues, and also: can anyone write their own UDF (the code requires registering a .jar), or is there a team that helps business users in that regard?

<comment><USER2> For UDF we support both -- users can write their own UDFs in their queries. We provide a number of well-tested UDFs to them as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone comment on how this compares to KSQL[1]?

[1] [https://www.confluent.io/product/ksql/](https://www.confluent.io/product/ksql/)

<comment><USER2> It is great to see that SQL becomes one of the de facto standards of building streaming analytics applications.

Personally I'm not a big fan of KSQL, given that:

(1) KSQL is built on top of Kafka Stream. There are use cases that we don't think Kafka Stream is a good fit. Please see the explanations above

(2) Inventing yet another SQL dialect is a bad idea in practice. Not only it incurs additional learning curves, but more importantly you have few hopes winning in development velocity. Calcite has been used by Flink, Storm, Beam, Dremio, etc. The community is simply way bigger even compared to the total number of engineers in Confluent.

Again this is just my personal take it does not reflect the stands of Uber.

<comment> nevi-me I share your sentiment here. Having a common base to work from also has the benefit that end-users, the BI or Data Science practitioner (whom we empower as data engineers) can expect a stable SQL dialect that they'll be able to use everywhere*.

I haven't followed Spark in recent months, but what I recall was that the SQL DSL had some caveats at first, because certain things weren't yet implemented.

My anecdote has been that projects that implement SQL after a while, typically don't deliver the whole thing on initial release. I imagine it's often quite a lot of work.

The more projects that use Calcite, the more upstream contributions there would be ...

<comment><USER11> Spark actually has probably the best standard SQL support among all open source big data frameworks. It can run all of TPC-DS queries without modifications.

<comment><USER2> TPC-DS evaluates against batch processing and it is great to hear that Spark supports all of them.

I think the space for streaming processing is still quickly evolving. Many features like stream-table joins, CTEs, streaming joins with late arrival data are unimplemented or do not even have clear semantics yet. It would be great to see a benchmarks like TPC-DS in the domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This uses Kafka as a core piece of infrastructure. I realize that Kafka Streams was not available when AthenaX was built, but would it be a good framework to move to ?</comment>


Internationalizing your Rails Application - <AUTHOR> http://eng.joingrouper.com/blog/2014/04/03/rails-internationalization-translation/

<comment><USER3> Have you ever heard of Tr8n? [http://github.com/tr8n](http://github.com/tr8n)

And specifically Tr8n for RoR: [https://github.com/tr8n/tr8n_rails_clientsdk](https://github.com/tr8n/tr8n_rails_clientsdk)

It is a powerful translation framework, which significantly simplifies the translation process, while improving your code readability.

First of all you don't need to deal with resources bundles at all - <USER2> English keys right in the code. Tr8n takes care of the rest.

<%= tr("Hello World") %>

Dynamic data tokens are very easy to work with:

<%= tr("Hello {user}", :user => "Michael") %>

It fully supports language context rules:

<%= tr("You have {count||message}", :count => 10) %> <%= tr("{user|He, She} likes this", :user => some_user) %> <%= tr("{users||likes, like} this a lot", :user => some_users) %>

It even supports language cases:

<%= tr("{actor} likes {target::possessive} message", ...) %>

Tr8n uses TML (Translation Markup Language) to define translation keys that now an be shared across all platforms and applications (mobile, web, desktop).

TML can easily handle data and decoration tokens within the same key context:

<%= tr("You have [bold: {count||message}]", :count => 10, :bold => lambda{|t| "<strong>${t}</strong>"}) %>

<%= tr("This is indeed [bold] a very [italic: powerful] framework]",...) %>

You can predefine all your lambdas elsewhere and use default data and decorations throughout your app.

The same sentence above, since it uses TML instead of hardcoded HTML, will actually produce an NSAttributedString in iOS properly decorated in any language.

Tr8n is used in conjunction with Tr8nHub.com where you have access to UTM (Universal Translation Memory) - a huge database of translations used across all applications. You may get fully translated by just connecting to it.

Disclosure: I've been working on Tr8n for the past 4 years, constantly improving it. We are about to launch a new site soon that will make a lot of things much cleaner and easier. The framework is used by companies like Yammer and Geni.

I forgot to mention that you get inline translation tools, translation widgets, and a lot more...

<comment><USER4> Hmmm. I like the idea of a shared database, but on the flipside you "only" need your developers to precisely understand the language they're using. The vast majority of people have no need for a deep understanding of their native language, I'd be worried about subtly-wrong translations. Something is better than nothing, but _weird_ is still bad. For example, you use "you" in "You have {count||message}" \- there's no gender or other meaning encoded, it'll probably be a bit off for some languages.

More technically: how does this translate?

> _This is indeed [bold] a very [italic: powerful] framework][ /bold]_

To make a hypothetical worst-case scenario, say one of the target languages combines "this" and "powerful" into a single word, splits "framework" into three, and reorders it so conceptually you flip between bold and italic and plain practically at random. There's (probably) an element of aesthetics combined with the text's meaning, _can_ the crowd detect that aesthetic? What if it varies all over your site because it's sourcing from different crowds?

Similarly, say you refer to "this" thing on the website/app, which is up and a little to the right, but not this other thing to the left. RTL probably switches that, and does "up and a little to the right" have an encoding in TML so that the meaning is retained if a language has a specific word for that?

<comment><USER3> Groxx, you bring up very good points. Let me see if I can address them all.

In the case of "You have {count||message}" as with actually pretty much any translation key, an implied "viewing_user" token is automatically added by the Tr8n SDK to provide the gender of the viewing user. So in languages, like Hebrew, where "You" depends on the gender of the person you are referring to, there would be actually 2 translations for the key:

"Yesh leha {count||hodaa, hodaot}" for {viewing_user: {gender: male}}

"Yesh lah {count||hodaa, hodaot}" for {viewing_user: {gender: female}}

The SDK would know how to pull the right translation and do the substitution at the time of the expression evaluation.

Here is what inline translator tool looks like when you deal with such a situation:

Notice there is a link below the text area to generate context rules for the phrase:

[http://grab.by/vMTk](http://grab.by/vMTk)

When you select that option, you can generate all rule permutations for the key:

[http://grab.by/vMTo](http://grab.by/vMTo)

[http://grab.by/vMUc](http://grab.by/vMUc)

Alternatively, you can use TML and provide a single translation:

"Yesh {viewing_user| male: leha, female: lah} {count|| one: hodaa, other: hodaot}"

Or using the shorthand notation:

"Yesh {viewing_user| leha, lah} {count|| hodaa, hodaot}"

Single pipe means "use the context, but don't display the value". Double pipe means "use context and display the value".

Looks a bit cryptic, but once you get a hang of it, it becomes a second nature. Try doing this in I18n.

Even in English you can do things like:

"{user| Born on:}" \- in other languages depends on user gender

"{user| He, She} likes this"

"{users|| loves, love} this"

Context Rules and Language Case Rules are defined per each language. And the conversion happens on the fly when needed.

For example, in Hebrew, the last example would need many more options:

"{users|| male: ohev, female: ohevet, males: ohavim, females: ohavot, other: ohavim} ze"

Because in Hebrew it matters whether all users in the list are male, female or mixed.

In Russian, it needs 2 cases - same as English (but only in present tense):

"{users|| lubit, lubyat} eto"

But if the key happened to be in past tense like:

"{users} liked this"

In English is same for whether there is one person in the list or many.

In Russian, we get 3 cases:

"{users|| lubil, lubila, lubili} eto"

Etc...

For the decoration tokens in a sentence like:

"This is indeed [bold] a very [italic: powerful] framework [/bold]"

It is up to the translator to completely shift things around in any possible way to convey the meaning of the original key. The only thing the SDK does is try to ensure that you don't try to inject anything ugly into the sentence. So lets say the translation to the above in Elbonian would be:

"Munchu punchu [bold: munchuchu] punchu"

Since the Elbonian language doesn't even have a separate word for "powerful", but instead a single word for "a very powerful framework", so they had to omit the italic part altogether. And that is perfectly fine. The translator's job is to provide the best translation that would convey the most meaning of the original sentence. Well, and they should try to massage the decoration tokens the best they can, if they can at all.

Since they could use the inline translator tools, they should be able to see their result right away and try to make it look the best they can in the space where the key appears on the site.

The beauty about the decoration tokens is that they are replaceable and reconfigurable even after you have hundreds of translations for the key. As I was mentioning earlier, in Rails the tokens will be replaced with HTML, but in iOS you can create an NSAttributedString and reuse all translations, etc...

I didn't fully understand your "up and a little to the right" example. If you can give me an actual example, that would be great.

TML works in RTL and LTR cases equally well. And since you are the one controlling the container of the app, you can use CSS to make it look like whatever you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the most annoying things about translation is that the length of the string may change which can mess up designs and layouts. For example German strings tend to be longer than their English equivalents. Or dealing with languages which orientation is right to left (eg. Hebrew).

<comment><USER6> At an airbnb techtalk they stressed how this is a really annoying problem for them. They actually have a subdomain that substitutes longer than normal english strings within their design:

[https://xxlong.airbnb.com/](https://xxlong.airbnb.com/)

<comment><USER4> That's a pretty common approach. In Rails it's also not too hard to monkey patch I18n in development to e.g. double every string it returns, or throw in random UTF characters.

The hard part I've encountered is that you have to _think_ about text differently. Things that are identical in English but have different semantic meanings must be split. Plurals. Almost-never concatenating or .join(',')ing or .split()ing. It's pretty easy to write yourself into a corner unless you stick to doing it right all the time, which takes some time to learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the javascript part: [https://github.com/fnando/i18n-js](https://github.com/fnando/i18n-js)</comment>


Maybe, null and boilerplate code - <AUTHOR> http://jaspervdj.be/posts/2010-01-04-maybe-null-boilerplate.html

<comment><USER2> The jist of the post is that "maybe is superior to null", because maybe does null lifting.

That argument, however, is a bit shallow. The first question to ask is, why not just make null behave like Maybe in the first place? That would be the sensible thing.

I could buy the argument "aren't monads neat, because they let you do lifting", but that wasn't the main point.

Null isn't inferior to maybe. It's just that many languages don't implement the "right" semantics for null(from a ux perspective).</comment>


Farming Innovations in a Slum - <AUTHOR> http://www.afrigadget.com/2008/09/04/innovations-in-a-slum-kibera-case-study/ <comment><USER2> Slightly related:

 _South Africa's Roundabout has devised a way to harness the energy generated by kids playing (ingenious in itself), as they spin on an outdoor merry-go- round_ <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000446.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting story, but where does all of their non-organic waste go now that the waste dump is gone? They probably just have to walk further to throw it away somewhere else.

Does anyone have data on the economic feasibility of setting up plastic, glass, etc recycling plants in 3rd world countries?

<comment><USER4> I don't have data, but from my own experience (I am Brazilian, living in the US for 7 yrs) I can tell you that recycling is not very common simply because people reuse a lot of stuff rather than recycling. The concept of reuse is ingrained in the culture due to lack of money, and not only the poor, but the middle-class do it a lot too. Some examples:

* Product plastic containers are washed and reused to store food, instead of throwing them away. Plastic containers are made sturdier (sometimes even made out of glass and with nice designs) because the companies know people will reuse them, so companies see it as a kind of free product advertisement.

* Soft drinks and beer are commonly sold in big glass bottles, which are then taken back to the distributor, washed, and then reused (not recycled, but reused).

* Electronics: Because labor is cheap and goods are expensive, people fix equipments instead of throwing them away. Parts are reused to the max, and there is an entire after-market ecosystem for them.

Last time I visited my family, it struck me how smaller my mom's trash can in Brazil is compared to my trash can here in the US. It may sound like a dumb comparison, but illustrates my point that we generate way more trash over here (and I am actually pretty conscious about reusing stuff).

<comment><USER3> Brazil isn't exactly a 3rd world country, but thank you for your input. A great example or using our resources more effectively.

I asked about the feasibility of recycling plants because I can recall seeing piles of trash (plastics, paper, cans, food, etc) in Indonesia all over the place. Even right next to some of the local shrines. Locals may reuse/recycle some items but it looked like most of their trash when into these piles that were often burned at some point in time. The thick black smoke billowing off of these smoldering trash heaps was disgusting and can't be great for the peopl e or the environment.</comment></comment></comment>


Indian Startup Little Eye Labs Confirms Acquisition By Facebook, Deal $10-$15M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/07/little-eye-labs-acquisition/

<comment><USER2> Other post with way more comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7021614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7021614)

</comment><comment><USER3> Big Day for Indian Tech- Congrats to the team at Little Eye Labs

</comment><comment><USER4> big dreams with little eyes :D</comment>


Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-online-tracking-device-that-is-virtually-impossible-to-block <comment><USER2> can anyone explain how / why a canvas drawing should be unique? Doesn't that defeat the point of canvas?

edit:

So here is poc canvas fingerprint code [1]. The upshot seems to be (1) the process of turning the canvas drawing into an image (image processing, export, compression, etc) leaks information, and (2) anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering also leak information. But as near as I can tell, both of those are essentially equivalent to information available in the user-agent string: os version and browser version. There must be more here because, eg, for this to be useful as a ios fingerprinting solution there are so few device + os versions available this info is mostly useless. What am I missing?

[1] [https://www.browserleaks.com/canvas](https://www.browserleaks.com/canvas)

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like just one more thing to add to the list at broswerspy.dk, shown in practice by the EFF: [https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log](https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not wanting to detract from linking to an interesting technique, I should say, but NoScript seems to block it just fine.

<comment><USER3> I suppose using an old browser without canvas support would work too. But then again you are opening yourself up to all sorts of other vulnerabilities.

[http://caniuse.com/#search=canvas](http://caniuse.com/#search=canvas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given we are dealing with a virtual impossibility, you can easily get around it by linking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong brownian motion producer.

Alternatively, you could setup a VM to rejig all its browser settings and fonts and stuff each time it is used and then browse from there.

<comment><USER2> or, you can get around it by using an ios device: there is roughly 1 hardware release / year plus a near-lockstep upgrading of the os + browser. Thus fingerprinting techniques are nearly useless because you have the same fingerprint as the other (rough guess) 40m US iphone-5 owners.</comment></comment>


A Conversation with Arthur Whitney (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242 <comment><USER3> This little section just blew my mind...

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

BC: Do you ever look at your own code and think, "What the hell was I doing here?"

AW: No, I guess I don't.

BC: Wow! I confess that I tend to write comments for my future self. I know that when I come back to code I've written, I often don't recall instantly what the problem at hand was or how I solved it. Now you've got me thinking that maybe I'm just in the wrong language. When you're at this higher level of abstraction, maybe it's easier to see your intent.

In terms of debugging your code, obviously the power of a terse language such as K or Q is that, presumably, it's easier to find bugs by inspection. How do you debug them?

AW: In C I never learned to use the debugger so I used to never make mistakes, but now I make mistakes and I just put in a print statement. K is interpreted, so it's a lot easier. If I'm surprised at the value of some local at some point, I can put in a print, and that's really all I do.

BC: That works well when you have deterministic inputs. What if the nature of the problem is just less reproducible—for example, if you were in an event- driven system where you had a confluence of events that led to a problem?

AW: It has been 20 years now that I've had Wall Street customers—they're doing 2 billion transactions a day and they have trillion-row databases—and in those 20 years, there was one time where we couldn't reproduce the bug. That was nasty. I knew the kinds of operations that they were doing and I finally found it by just reading my code.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

I can't believe, well I guess I can, and have to, that people out there can be this good. Is there something missing from the reality painted here?

In general, Mr. Whitney seems like a freakin' genius, and I'm gonna take a stab at learning some K just to see what it provides. For those interested, from a previous thread today about Mr. Whitney's work, is Kona an open source implementation of K:

[https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona](https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona)

<comment><USER4> I had dealings with him about 15 years ago, and he really is that good.

However, you need to appreciate he's that good because he's able to see solutions that are easy to implement, and not that he has any special implementation talent. K itself is tiny. The programs he's written in it are an order of magnitude less, yet do a frightening amount for their size.

<comment><USER5> Yes, he is that good. I worked directly with him for a few years and it deeply changed my long term approach. Side effect is that it became harder to deal with the "normals" ;-) seriously though, it made me very impatient with the sorry state of the "state of the art" in the valley.

<comment><USER6> Just grokking K had that effect on me ... I can't even estimate how much farther that will go if I had a chance to work with Arthur.

And I keep thinking "ignorance is bliss" might have been right in this respect - perhaps I would have been better off had I not lost my appreciation for the (now obviously sad) state of software construction. (Engineering it is clearly not, by and large).

But I wouldn't go back. Would you?

<comment><USER5> No, I wouldn't go back. That said, it has made it rather difficult to fit comfortably in standard settings. I've been successful so far but taking Arthur's lessons and applying from various domains, to software, and into cluster/system/soc arch in my case, has been viewed as rather unorthodox.

I find that especially in the valley, adherence to buzzwords and fashion of the day is a little too common for my taste now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I really like Arthur's philosophy of rewriting code, it's something we don't often have the chance to do.

</comment><comment><USER7> I didn't 'get' K until I read an interview with Arthur Whitney in the ACM Queue. Apart from performance, you're also getting craftsmanship.

[http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242)

It turns out he rewrites the whole compiler from scratch in C every four years.

This is a snapshot from the source code of 'J' also by Arthur Whitney - <USER2> precursor to 'K'.

[http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm#incunabulum](http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm#incunabulum)

This is it described by Ken Iverson: "The final impetus that got J started was the one-page interpreter fragment that Arthur wrote, recorded in Appendix A of An Implementation of J [29] and also reproduced in Appendix A below. My immediate reaction on seeing the page was recoil and puzzlement: it looked nothing like any C code I had ever seen. ("Is it even C?") However, Ken counselled that I should reserve judgment. "

[http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm](http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm)

<comment><USER8> There's a thread on Reddit from a few years ago that gives a more mixed picture. Sure, the C code is terse, but that comes partly from doing things like deferencing pointers without checking they're not null. One of the Reddit commenters describes it as "optimistic" coding. [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8cckg/arthur_wh...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8cckg/arthur_whitney_on_apl_k_q_and_elegant_code/)

Without wanting to psychologise this too much, when I put the reckless coding practice together with a paragraph like "Whitney is no respecter of rules. One of the scariest things I ever did as a young man was following him through central Toronto on a bicycle." I get the impression Whitney thinks he doesn't have to follow other people's rules because he is an infallible genius. Seriously unbecoming and offputting.

<comment><USER9> Well, clearly Whitney has been hugely successful with his odd little language.

There's the case for a kind of extreme pragmatism — writing code that does the one thing it needs to do, without particular concerns for things like abstraction.

We all write one-off scripts that are short and precise, but for a myriad of reasons won't scale to anything bigger or more general: we cheat and use global variables; we target one specific use case but don't allow parametization/configuration to support others; we target one OS and a certain constellation of dependencies; and so on.

What Whitney has accomplished, I suspect, is that he has found a way to reduce the problem surface by going for extreme simplicity in absolutely all areas of his system, which is by making certain assumptions. Everything is lists or simple data types, there are no abstractions (by which I mean things like interfaces, generics, abstract data types, even custom types), almost everything is in-memory.

You can do this with a Lisp or a Scheme, too. But the temptation is always to reach out for abstractions and patterns and build complicated systems out of subsystems. A database would have a cache manager, a page manager, a planner, an index manager, an SQL parser, a transaction log manager, etc. etc.

K shows that you don't _need_ go for this clean, compartmentalized, layered subsystem approach if the whole program is small enough to make it easy to see the whole system on the screen. You can use global variables because it doesn't violate any layering. You don't abstract things like indexes and operators into abstract internal APIs because you know at any point what they are.

An example of this kind of extremist simplification is how kdb+ stores tables: It memory-maps the entire table file and treats it as an in-memory list. Instead of having to invent a paging mechanism and create functions that work on tuples in pages, they can simply reuse all the vector-oriented K operators, which work on the tuples exactly the way they work on other in-memory lists.

I don't think I could write K, but it is certainly a source of inspiration when designing systems. We developers have a tendency to pattern-match and generalize, when often "ad hoc" techniques would be better. The old adage is "make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler", but it's actually possible to make things simpler.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand your last sentence. Things can be made simpler than possible?

If you focus just on inner loops, this kind of simplicity is widespread and essential for performance. APL and its derivates are great specification languages for array manipulation. If you are writing a networked window system, on the other hand, a "high ceremony" language is more appropriate because you need to cope with protocols and abstractions. Right?

<comment><USER9> My point is that it's wise to challenge assumptions about what "simple" means. Self-imposed constraints often yield more novel, more optimized solutions than when you have all the freedom in the world. Maybe flat files interacted with via fopen() works better; maybe we just don't need our layers to accrete until we have AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.

A networked window system — perhaps not the best example. With that one I think the assumptions are flawed (ie., that you can make one without introducing painful leaky abstractions) to begin with. ;-)

<comment><USER8> Well, in terms of whether the example is a well-posed question, a networked window system isn't too different from the WWW, which as we know by now works pretty flawlessly.

Perhaps the key contrast here is between the tendency toward static mathematical perfection of the APL family and the notion of dynamic languages for building systems that Alan Kay et al would propose.

"APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond." \--Joel Moses

There's a talk by Ian Piumarta that tries to get to the core of what the VPRI guys feel is important. I'm not sure about it but it seems worth mentioning in this context: Ian Piumarta "Building Your Own Dynamic Language" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn7kTPbW6QQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn7kTPbW6QQ)

Also, this: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/objects- essay.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/objects-essay.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dronecheap – Compare Drone Prices and Features - <AUTHOR> https://dronecheap.net <comment><USER2> What about low end quadcopters like the Syma models?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on adding more models (the Syma X5C-1 and X8C will be added soon). Let me know if you have a particular one you'd like to see added.</comment></comment>


6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss of Formal Schooling - <AUTHOR> http://www.theonion.com/content/news/6_year_old_stares_down_bottomless

<comment><USER2> This ties in nicely with the lecture series recently on Death.

The Onion in good form, blending humor and a question that more and more of us are asking: really, what is the point of school?

A question which has been asked a lot on HN recently, and I hope to see more answers in the near future that are not "eh, school is necessary".

I am so grateful that I started taking part time jobs as early as the 6th grade, after school at INTERESTING places. A patent law office, SETI (really, I was amazingly lucky), SLAC, several software companies. Without those experiences, I am not sure I would have ever realized that work and fun can be synonymous. School certainly didn't teach that idea.

<comment><USER3> I would never recomend anybody not going to school. It is a great learning experience, and I am not saying academically only. Also socially.

Really, there is nothing prohibiting you on working on a startup idea during summer time, and if it goes well, you can run with it. 3 months is a lot of time, and time is a great luxury when you are working full time. And by the time you reach 21-22 your ideas will have changed.

What I wouldn't recomend, is somebody paying too much for school, and ending up in debt up to their eyeballs when they get out. Forcing them to work full time, instead on an idea.

But even financially, you could go to community college for the first two years, get grants, scholarships, some debt, attend good state school (that tend to be cheaper).

There is a lot of help out there, you just have to seek it. And if you question the value of school, then you either are going to the wrong school (too exepensive, too party type), or not taking the right kind of classes (ie. bullshit majors such as communication, or businness....).

when you start working, you have contact with the same people, doing the same things, for months or years, and not exposed to different point of views, or people that you would be exposed in school.

<comment><USER2> I was actually thinking just about K-12 education. I got a lot of rewarding stuff out of college. I think most kids would turn out just fine if they were given much less structured enjoyable activities while growing up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, there is a bottom. There is definitely a bottom to the abyss.

The question is, can you calculate the length of the abyss based on the time it takes for your screams to reach the surface?

</comment><comment><USER5> _Someone_ has to look after the children, yes? I started off by writing a lament about my own school days, and how much I loved summer, and how much time was wasted, etc. But then I realized...my mother had to work a day job, and I was an asshole even as a child. Should she have to deal with me 24 hours a day while making a living? Is that possible...?

Is it not more efficent to allow an institution to babysit children rather than working parents? It's a matter of cost/benefits like anything else.

Still, I wish I could really "drop out" from it all. The article reminds me of that fact. I spend 3 dollars/day on food and every other penny goes to shining my prison walls.

<comment><USER6> _Is it not more efficent to allow an institution to babysit children rather than working parents? It's a matter of cost/benefits like anything else._

Maybe. But if what we want is an institution for babysitting, we ought to _call_ it "babysitting", and have conversations about the institution of babysitting.

Instead we call what we do "education" and have conversations where we treat it like a magic spell that will transform children and society.

I would love it if I could hear a politician or columnist say "more investment in babysitting is always a good thing", or "babysitting is the key to solving our social problems".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the goal of school is supposed to be to teach children how to evaluate which actions will be most beneficial to them. What school actually teaches is how to be dishonest/illogical in all the correct ways for a given society.

<comment><USER8> Teaches you how to cheat and get away with it. How to act like you are doing something but not really; how to get others to do your work for you; etc...

<comment><USER7> those are the obvious ones yes. the ones that affect people most strongly are the ones we don't think about. You probably picked those because they all seem somewhat unwholesome. It gets more interesting if you take a step back and look at what you _do_ consider wholesome.

<comment><USER8> Ok. Can you point me towards what you were thinking of?

<comment><USER7> Our schools teach us things like the founding fathers were heroic revolutionaries casting off the shackles of monarchy for the benefit of mankind because The U.S. government has to justify its own existence as being somehow intrinsically, morally, or mystically correct. No one wants to think that the government is just a bunch of guys who own the land between canada and mexico, and got it by inciting mob violence and forming armed militias. (see the Nobel Prize winning _Ideological Origins of the American Revolution_ ) But you can pick any major historical event and look at the basic message that kids are sent: the civil war was about freeing the slaves, WW2 was about saving the jews, vietnam was about stopping communism, Iraq was about deposing a mad dictator with WMD's. Step back from any of these and look at the various motivations of all the players involved and you get a very complex picture that doesn't reduce easily to an ideological byline (America: spreading freedom!). But every country teaches children that it is awesome, otherwise those children might grow up not believing in the legitimacy of the people in power.

In short, the actual function of school is to tell children that the current balance of power is the correct one, and comes up with all manner of reasons why this is so regardless of what the power structure actually is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> thank god for recess! And school wasn't so bad. I mostly have happy memories (I guess I have forgot the bad ones).

Still I remember being so envious of the dog. I was forced to walk a mile through the snow/rain at 7 am and the dog just got to curl up next to the radiator. It's amazing that I was able to get up so early for so long.

<comment><USER10> _I was forced to walk a mile through the snow/rain at 7 am_

So was I. We're showing our age.

Does anyone do that anymore?

<comment><USER11> I think it depends where you are. In a lot of places, parents seem to be so worried about the safety of their kids nowadays that they take them to school & pick them up until their mid-teens.

Having grown up in a small town in central Europe, I certainly walked (later cycled) to and from school (~2km), as did most colleagues that lived close enough. (the rest got the bus or train; many kids were picked up on Saturdays though) I haven't been around that school at 8am since I finished 6 years ago, so it's possible the situation has changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is a rather horrifying prospect, isn't it?

<comment><USER13> Yes, but it was a _lot_ better than the alternatives when mandatory schooling was instituted in most countries.

<comment><USER14> The problem with government is that it will take a policy that was a good idea in the 1800's and continue that policy until the country collapses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone who cares about this subject should read Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society".

<http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html>

He was ahead of his time and died in 2002, but his time is _now_. His ideas on "Learning Webs" and "Conviviality" are a goldmine for any startup not wanting to get rich but to actually _help the world_.</comment>


Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says - <AUTHOR> https://www.afp.com/en/news/826/ocean-plastic-waste-probably-comes-ships-report-says-doc-1kv8e91 <comment><USER3> I spend a day or two every year cleaning up a beach on a island off the coast of China. Its location relative to local sea currents makes it a natural garbage trap. It has been a radicalizing experience but maybe not in the way you would think.

Anecdotally about a third of the trash I pick up is fishing related - <USER2> nets, some buoys, but mostly thousands of small plastic sardine sized fishing net floats.

About a third is one-time use food packaging related - soda and water bottles mainly, but also so many bags for snacks, or tangentially cleaning bottles for hands/dishes. We could do better making less plastic waste with each meal. Straws are a very small part of that and a weird thing to fixate on relative to all the other one time use food waste we generate.

And the last third is various forms of hydrocarbon foams. This last one kills me because I see foams everywhere in the supply chain for consumer goods. TVs are shipped out in white styrofoam. Chips are shipped in with pink styrofoam. If it's fragile lab equipment it gets shipped in a box three times it's size full of packing peanut foam. Every product in the room you are in probably generated an equivalent volume of foam during its production. The foam lasts forever. I refuse to use it for anything we package and glad to see it phased out.

I would much prefer biodegradable paper like pulps to foam. As I understand the chemicals used to make hard paper bowls and straws may be their own kind of nasty endocrine disrupters but for all other packaging purposes, yes please. Less foam, more paper. Especially if some tweaks we can make packaging a carbon sink.

<comment><USER4> The fishing gets me. I used to fish from the shoreline a lot, but when I went snorkeling in a couple of beautiful places in the world all the lost tackle and line just made me angry at my past self. It's very hard to fish from the shoreline without leaving trash everywhere.

It's hard to think that every dollar I spent on tackle was a dollar I spent polluting the shoreline. It was out of sight, so it was out of mind.

I remember this incredible natural aquarium, formed in a wide, deep circular depression of a coral reef. And a single 30m piece of neon line riiight through the middle of it. Doubtless, it was left by a fisherman who swore at losing another $2 sinker, with no concept of what else they'd just done.

<comment><USER5> It's thinking like this that led me down the path of rejecting money/currency for the most part. Every dollar I spent is a vote for producing more of whatever I'm buying, directly correlated with habitat loss (for humans included) and animal deaths. And each transaction is like a curtain from behind which the finished product appears, handed to you with no information about its origin.

<comment><USER6> That's an interesting perspective. How does such an approach play out in practice?

<comment><USER5> The freeganism link in sibling comment provides a pretty good overview.

In my case, I live outdoors more than half the time, sometimes couchsurfing.

I obtain food primarily from waste.

My electronics are hand-me-downs.

For getting around, I ride with people going my way or walk. I am a careful driver, and sometimes I help drive as contribution. Sometimes I ride trains and buses, which cost minimal money.

I pay a few hundred a year for domains and hosting.

Occasionally, people offer me money. I used to not accept it, but now I just do my best to limit its use to the above.

If I go to a coffee shop, I typically do not buy a coffee. If I sit at a fast food place, I don't buy anything.

I do not feel that I owe anything to anyone just for occupying space.

I do, however, place some properly logoed cups (reused) on my table, and I pick up any trash on the floors, and fix the chairs, and sometimes wipe the tables with abandoned napkins.

It seems kind of silly sometimes, but it's a system that's working well for me now.

I like to visit libraries, though hours are typically limited.

It has taken me about 5 years to transition to this life from full-time job, apartment, and cat.

I had previous camping experience, and a relatively low regard for social norms. I am a man, which obviously helps with safety. But women do it too.

This practice has helped me develop my meditation practice, write more code I can be proud of, and travel without worry about where I'm going to stay when I get there.

Because my past jobs contributed to selling soft drinks, securities, oil, etc., I think that my "environmental karma" is much better. I also have the time to stop and pick up the trash everywhere I go, a practice I find to be both enjoyable and great "natural" exercise.

<comment><USER7> I'm honestly curious and not trying to be contrarian - what does your code produce if not more consumption in some way?

<comment><USER5> Well, it is not producing much at the moment, and it is consuming electricity and resources to run.

I am hoping that it will produce a better way for people to talk and connect, as well as provably reliable information store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is known. The number I have heard floated around is 45%. So, commercial fishing nets are a big problem when it comes to plastic in the oceans.

And here we are "saving the planet", by reducing the plastic straw consumption:

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/18/anti-straw- mo...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/18/anti-straw-movement- based-unverified-statistic-500-million-day/750563002/)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-07/plasti...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-07/plastic- straws-aren-t-the-problem)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic- straws-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-ban- fact-check-nyt.html)

Mental gymnastics at its best:

> "Whether it's 500 million or 500 a day, we shouldn't lose sight of the real > issue: Straws should be disposed of properly and should never, ever be > littered on land or in waterways," she said.

<comment><USER9> And here you are creating a _straw_ man argument.

Reducing straws won't "save the planet" on its own. We will improve the planet by doing multiple things.

Reducing plastic use (less packaging, fewer straws, reusable shopping bags) all play a _role_ in a much bigger effort.

<comment><USER10> Except that's not improving the planet even a bit — chances are, every one of those straws being used in an American city would end up in a well run landfill and have minimal impact on the environment. It's yet another example of knuckle dragging elites using state force to virtue signal. Meanwhile the real sources of the problem get ignored.

<comment><USER11> > chances are, every one of those straws being used in an American city would > end up in a well run landfill

My front yard disagrees. It's adjacent to a somewhat busy road, and straws are part of the debris I have to routinely clean up (along with various wrappers and cigarette butts).

<comment><USER12> > and straws are part of the debris I have to routinely clean up

I assume this cleaning includes putting them in your trash and the city taking them to a landfill?

It's obviously not the best path, but cities[0] (by necessity) generally do a good job cleaning up the trash that gets scattered around.

Bigger issue is non-urbanized areas where there isn't the density/wealth to clean up litter.

[0] The collection of people and institutions, not just the government.

<comment><USER13> Let's consider the biggest city in the U.S., NYC. Manhattan? An island of 1.8 million no more than 2 miles wide. Brooklyn and Queens are on a spit of land called "Long Island". Together they have 4.8 million residents. Staten Island is, you guessed it, an island. And the Bronx is necessarily very close to a lot of water.

People litter. Cigarette butts, straws, plastic bottles, etc. all very regularly and easily wind up in the ocean with an assist of a slight breeze.

<comment><USER14> I saw it in action firsthand in NYC. A garbage truck picked up an overflowing trash bin around midnight, and the dome of trash on top fell off and into the street, and the worker did not even break stride. Many well-meaning people took the time to carefully place their trash on the trash that was in a garbage bin, but they may as well have just dropped it on the street directly for all the good it did.

<comment><USER15> After I saw this happen a few times, I stopped taking the time to carefully place my trash, and just held onto it until I found an emptier receptacle. After all, emptying public trashcans is already a terrible job. The garbageman isn't carrying a broom and dustpan. Why make his job more difficult?

(I would distinguish public trashcans like this from e.g. commercial trashcans for the use of customers of private businesses. First, they should never fill over halfway. Second, the whole thing should be kept clean. Anything else is a failure of management.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most of this comes from a single type of ship waste:

"Half of the great Pacific garbage patch is made up of fishing nets, by weight, according to a report published last year in Scientific Reports."

<comment><USER17> So the ocean is being overfished and is being polluted by fishing. The clear answer is to ban fishing. Though, as someone who dislikes all seafood, this is easy for me to say.

<comment><USER18> "Approximately 1 billion people people are dependent on fish as the principal source of animal protein"

[http://www.suds-en- ligne.ird.fr/ecosys/ang_ecosys/intro1.htm](http://www.suds-en- ligne.ird.fr/ecosys/ang_ecosys/intro1.htm)

<comment><USER19> Is there something in particular necessary about animal protein, that it gets a distinct category from just protein in general?

It also stands to reason that if that many people really are dependent on fish, it will be devastating to them when overfishing and pollution destroy fish stocks. All the more reason to reduce fishing and build alternatives now.

<comment><USER20> > Is there something in particular necessary about animal protein, that it > gets a distinct category from just protein in general

Pretty worrying that people don't know that the only real sources of essential acids critical to humans are from seafood, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)

They aren't optional and the body sucks at synthesising them.

<comment><USER21> Humans can get EPA from algae, same as where fish get it, among other sources. Just look up "algae based omega 3 supplement". The body synthesizes DHA from all sorts of seeds and oils, else we'd be screwed.

Weirdly smug, alarmist post.

There are people who never eat seafood. Reading your post, you'd have to assume such people would be dead.

<comment><USER20> Historically none of the above is true. iodized salt, and the OM3 where almost universally received from sea based foods.

You are talking about sources that have only affected people in the last small period of time. There are a couple of million years of development that got you to the point of fortified cereals and pills.

> There are people who never eat seafood.

Woosh

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wonder if this will have an impact on plastic straw bans on land. It was always a feel-good hi-viz, low-impact measure given little evidence behind the measures.

<comment><USER23> Or even the context. A coffee shop in my neighborhood started keeping straws behind the counter, so that you have to ask for them.

And yet, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that there's less plastic in a straw than in a disposable coffee cup, let alone the doubled cups that they serve the coffee in in lieu of using those paper sleeves. _Certainly_ after they've stuck one of those plastic sippy lids on top of the whole affair. If they're worried about their waste stream, that's the place to start.

<comment><USER22> Many will have paper straws as substitutes, but I'm very skeptical they did a study regarding cradle-to-grave impact of the substitution. Maybe they are net positive (results wise), but I doubt they looked at numbers and said, yes, clearly paper straws are less impactful.

<comment><USER24> I imagine it's similar to the grocery bag situation. Reusable cotton canvas bags keep plastic out of the environment, but their production emits thousands of times more CO2 per bag than disposable plastic bags. If you buy groceries once a week, you basically have to use the cotton canvas bags the rest of your life to even have a chance at breaking even, everything's a trade-off.

<comment><USER25> Aren't there better materials to make the resuable bags out of than cotton ?

Also, you can reuse the plastic bags.

<comment><USER23> My favorites are made of nylon. It's a much lighter material than what most stores are selling as reusable bags. Enough so that you can easily keep 1 or 2 with you all the time if you're the kind of person to carry a purse or courier bag. Meaning that, unlike those canvas bags or the ones made out of that big heavy stiff plastic material, they're convenient enough to actually get used regularly.

I found one study that suggested, though, that the lowest environmental load came from the regular disposable bags as long as you reuse them until they wear out. The main reason I don't do that is that I've discovered that supermarket employees seem to really hate that, in a way they don't with the bags that are made for reuse.

I'm also inclined to guess that it's still bikeshedding. The shopping bag is really visible, but it's maybe a small amount of waste compared to all the unnecessary packaging for the products it's being used to carry home.

<comment><USER26> How does this hatred manifest?

<comment><USER27> Maybe because the normal unused plastic bags are in that sheet you can just peel one off and it is easily opened up thanks to the design of the plastic bag holder. While if I was recycling them they are probably a wadded bundle inside another plastic bag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I sometimes see biodegradable packing peanuts that resemble tasteless Cheese puffs used as alternative. So much better, I wonder why the styrofoam puffs are even still allowed.

Another side note, look at this sign that I've seen aboard vessels: [https://vesselplacards.com/product/garbage-overboard- marpol-...](https://vesselplacards.com/product/garbage-overboard-marpol-sign/)

It basically states "Don't throw garbage overboard, You could be breaking the law" as if it being illegal should be the only reason not to dump your waste in the environment.

<comment><USER29> "resemble tasteless Cheese puffs"

Resemble in looks or taste?

<comment><USER30> Both. They're made of corn starch, which is what puffy Cheetos are made of, and manufactured literally the same way, except without the cheese flavor powder mixed in. They taste like "nothing" (well, they probably taste like pure corn starch but I've never eaten that so I don't have a reference.)

Source: a member of my immediate family worked at a company that manufactured them and brought home many samples. We'd freak people out by eating them. The joke was always "What do you pack packing material in for shipping?"

<comment><USER31> Out of curiosity, do you risk rodent infestations using those? I would imagine rodents/bugs happily eat most human food, cheese puffs included, so if this is literally the same won't it suffer rodent risk?

<comment><USER32> The warehouse I worked in had a rodent infestation, they didn't eat the edible packing peanuts as far as I could tell though. -- never saw any with bites out of them and they didn't noticeably disappear.

As an aside, don't drink from beer/pop cans without washing the tops.

<comment><USER33> please elaborate on why not? I would think they'd have to be relatively sterile. Boxes are stacked flat, can tops must be in a pringles style stack until they're assembled into a can.

Where are they contaminated?

<comment><USER34> I remember a story going around about people dying from rat urine on soda cans [1], but the veracity of the claim is questionable.

[1] [https://www.hoax-slayer.net/leptospirosis-death-warning- rat-...](https://www.hoax-slayer.net/leptospirosis-death-warning-rat-urine- soda-can-top/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I mean one thing does not take away from the other, it's necessary to stop wasting so many fish nets, AND reduce single-use plastics, AND fish less, etc. It's not OR it's AND.

This leads to reasoning like "it's fishing nets the actual issue, I might as well continue throwing a full trash can full of packages every 3 days".

It's not true, fishing nets is actually only 45%, the other 55% we can still work on that's a lot, it's the majority. Another way is to just stop eating fish.

In my local supermarket, if I want to buy 4 peaches they come in a plastic container wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet, not kidding.

<comment><USER8> agree that we have to work on multiple things, but the point was that a disproportionate amount of resources are placed behind getting rid of something that is a drop in the bucket. it's not "should we get rid of A or B?" We agree it's A and B, but we need to focus on the thing that has the bigger impact first.

<comment><USER35> > we need to focus on the thing that has the bigger impact first

Why is this, why wait to solve the fishing net problems before taking other measures?

I see this line of thought a lot here in Hacker News, especially in topics related to climate change for example.

These things can and should be tackled in parallel at the same time. We can all take responsibility personally, how about trying to use less single-use plastics, buy in local grocery shops more with reusable bags, and stop eating fish?

We can all do that, we don't need to wait for some international fishing committee to decide for years on what is the best way to change the rules on how nets can be made or handled.

<comment><USER36> Do you have the experience of triaging bugs/features at work? There's always more problems then we can solve at once. There is only so many man hours/money/attention available.

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure which approach this analogy supports.

Sometimes it makes sense to fix small obvious issues quickly ("oops, forgot to check for null here") before diving into potentially worse but more complicated problems ("user who signed up on legacy plan reports that some playlists are incomplete in new app").

Sometimes there's such a high impact issue that you have to try to address it immediately, even if you suspect that it will involve a hellish trek through the least-maintained code in the whole company before you can even isolate a reproducible test case.

And if you have multiple developers working on bugs, one person may be doing the first while a different person is handling the second.

<comment><USER36> There are different ways/philosophies to triage; but the fact remains that you have to triage. That's all I wanted to argue. You have to pick and choose what to work on, so, in the context of environmental-protections, it's worth arguing the merits of different problems/solutions IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Extensive air pollution from China or India that surpasses the West also doesn't seem to get much attention, e.g. [1] [2]

Greta visited the US and gave some compelling speeches. Will she visit China and India and do the same?

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/07/01/china- emits-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/07/01/china-emits-more- carbon-dioxide-than-the-u-s-and-eu-combined/#3ee0b6bc628c)

[2] [https://qz.com/india/1581665/indias-carbon-emissions- growing...](https://qz.com/india/1581665/indias-carbon-emissions-growing- faster-than-us-china-says-iea/)

<comment><USER39> It gets loads of attention, not least as both India and China have developed _way_ beyond the free "developing nation" pass they got in previous climate agreements. Which plenty said was a big mistake at the time, but we are where we are.

No doubt if the climate movement in China and India invite her, she might well go. Well, perhaps not China as they lack freedom of association and speech. There have been protests in HK though. I doubt there is even as much in China as in Russia.

Russia has school strikes for climate consisting of _one_ person demonstrating, changing places with another every hour or two[1]. That's because two or more demonstrating would fall foul of restrictions, as would anyone under 18.

[1] (Photos, text in Cyrillic): [https://twitter.com/Fridaysforfut20/status/11776740588482478...](https://twitter.com/Fridaysforfut20/status/1177674058848247810)

<comment><USER40> If you were a rising country coming up from behind in a world where the US dominates, would you want to reduce your growth to ensure you don't catch up to the rest of the world as quickly?

<comment><USER41> You might if you were one of the nations most likely to be harmed by near-term climate change, and you were already dealing with a severe water crisis to boot.

[https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/india/india-water-crisis- intl...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/india/india-water-crisis-intl- hnk/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've traveled the entire coastline of Vietnam and much of Cambodia. It is entirely covered in plastic trash. There is even plastic in all the rivers way up in the mountains. I can't imagine this just being Chinese ships.

<comment><USER43> Nobody in the comments read the article but all this is claiming is that land waste is a smaller percentage of _deep sea_ plastic waste. It's still the vast majority of coastal waste

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How long can we keep giving China, India etc a pass? And ourselves in allowing this level of irresponsible trade to happen?

We're busy panicking about "climate change" in terms of something that is going to end the world in a dozen years, it probably isn't... That said, pollution in and of itself should be a goal in terms of not doing it, and not trading with nations that do. As it is, there are cities in the U.S. I pretty much avoid or won't go to because the air quality is so bad that I can't stand being there. People need to stop with the boogie-man scare tactics pushing a political agenda and actually start concentrating on the very real issues that should be higher order priorities.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's undoubtedly some mix of "all of the above", thanks to plastic being everywhere and used in nearly everything.

We save the ocean by requiring "all of the above" to act differently. Ships, shipping, fishing, recycling, nations, individuals. Most especially _producers._

</comment><comment><USER45> I recall reading two years ago several reports which claimed that around 90% of all the plastic in the world's oceans flows there through just 10 rivers.

> "The shipping and fishing industries also play a part. In 2018 researchers > found that, in terms of weight, almost half of the plastic in the Great > Pacific Garbage Patch -- a notorious area of floating trash three times the > size of France -- was made up of fishing nets. On the other hand, > microplastics made up 94% of the estimated 1.8 trillion tiny pieces floating > in the area."

[https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/24/health/plastic-pollution- rive...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/24/health/plastic-pollution-rivers- oceans-scn-intl/index.html)

Most of the time all the stats don't add up, but either way, humanity leaves a big mess and plastic is probably one of those materials we will regret inventing.

<comment><USER46> That study was WIDELY reported on, and most of the reporting was faulty. For example this article says 'around 90% of all the plastic in the world's oceans flows there through just 10 rivers.'

But that isn't what the study says - the study only deals with plastic that comes from rivers, not all plastic in the ocean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't believe this. -- About two years ago there was a study which said that 88 to 95 percent of the total global load of plastics in the oceans [edit: wrong see below] would come from 10 rivers:

\- [https://phys.org/news/2017-10-plastic-rivers-stem- plastics-o...](https://phys.org/news/2017-10-plastic-rivers-stem-plastics- ocean.html)

\- [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611) and link to table [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611/tables/1](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611/tables/1)

Still, of course, fishermen shouldn't throw their plastic bottles over board and better care to their fishing nets.

<comment><USER48> From your own source:

> Now scientists have found that 10 rivers around the world where plastic > waste is mismanaged contribute to most of the oceans' total loads THAT COME > FROM RIVERS.

(emphasis mine)

<comment><USER47> Uh, that's embarassing. Completely missed this (since two years... :-( ). Thank you.

<comment><USER46> That study was WIDELY reported on, and most of the reporting was faulty. Now this river factoid is stuck in millions of heads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Are there actual photos of the great pacific garbage patch? I've heard about it for sometime now but it seems a lot of the photos on image search depict small scale stuff, garbage visibly close to shore, or illustrations.

I was disappointed to find Wikipedia didn't have any direct birds eye view of the patch in any photos. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch)

I see a lot of illustrations depicting the scale of the patch but is the reason there are no actual photos because the flotsam density is too low to be picked up by a camera at the necessary height to capture a large area of it? What's the deal?

<comment><USER50> From your link:

> Despite the common public perception of the patch existing as giant islands > of floating rubbish, its low density (4 particles per cubic meter) prevents > detection by satellite imagery, or even by casual boaters or divers in the > area.

> This is because the patch is a widely dispersed area consisting primarily of > suspended "fingernail-sized or smaller bits of plastic", often microscopic, > particles in the upper water column.

<comment><USER49> Nice find!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It is interesting that so much of the discussion of meat consumption and climate change has been centered around cows and other terrestrial animals. I'm curious if anyone knows of a good source that compares the greenhouse gas emissions from fishing vs land-based livestock.

</comment><comment><USER52> What about the military (navies) too?

I'm just now reminded of stories from a guy who served on a troopship. The waste and pollution was staggering.

Dumping fuel, garbage, bilge water.

Expending all your ration of ammo, killing the porpoises riding the bow wave, so that you don't have to unload all that ammo later.

</comment><comment><USER53> One of the problems with this, is that consumers are given no choice in packing material. I just bought a new TV. The TV had the protective sticky plastic, and was wrapped in plastic. Each individual component came in a plastic bag and then all in one larger bag.

All properly disposed of by local regulations.

The fault then somehow falls onto the consumer if it ends up in the ocean?

Taxing companies based on it seems like a trade dispute as most are not US companies. We've seen how easily those are won.

</comment><comment><USER54> The pointless use of plastic is astounding. Just the other day I was sorting through electronic cables that were individually packaged in their own plastic bags. What the fuck was the point? Even the actual connector pins had their own dedicated plastic covers, and the cable was tied with a plastic tie. Yet the plastic bags were somehow still needed?

Jesus fucking Christ.

<comment><USER55> The reason is that each cable in its own package is a separate SKU, purchased from a separate supplier, and tossed one-per on an assembly line that is filling the box you finally received. I suspect that if, say, samsung or nintendo was told to stop putting bags on every single cable, they'd just add a step to their assembly line for snipping open the existing bags and tossing them in the garbage.

The real solution will be (as usual) more complex than you'd guess at first, and I don't have a good idea for where you'd start. Maybe find the point in the supply chain where these baggies are first introduced and add a tax on them at that point?

<comment><USER56> To be fair, that would still be an improvement because we could make them isolate those bags and recycle or burn for energy or something. It is by comparison impossible to control what consumers do with those bags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Aren't there some laws prohibiting this kind of behavior? I mean, willingly and purposely dumping tons of plastic waste in the ocean should be a crime everywhere no? Can't do that with oil, why is it permitted with plastic?

Well, at least it's another group added to my list of people we could do without.

</comment><comment><USER58> Go to virtually any parking lot and notice all the crap that's littered all over it. Most of it will end up in the ocean eventually. (not to mention all the crap in every street gutter)

</comment><comment><USER59> It sounds like a great way to avoid bearing the responsibility. Better, we can now point our finger at someone else.

</comment><comment><USER60> Sure if they dump it to the sea!

</comment><comment><USER61> So the problem is not bad habits from consumers or the over-use of disposable plastic containers, it's some rogue _Chinese_ ships. How convenient.

<comment><USER62> The question is not if those are bad, the question is where does that plastic come from.

over-use of disposable plastic is bad independently from whether it ends in the ocean or not. But if you want to reduce this specific pollution you need to actually understand where it comes from.

<comment><USER61> There are two different things at stake here.

1\. The study. Scientific work is essential to the understanding of the dynamics of ocean pollutions. Nothing to criticize here.

2\. The press coverage. Interestingly enough, it comes from a French media. You're probably not aware of that if you don't live in France (especially because of the big marketing stance on environmental issues Macron is taking of the international scene) but there is a huge reactionary movement against environmental policies nowadays in the medias in France. This article, and the editorial angle taken around the study, completely fits into that (worrysome) trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Anyone that lives in a city next to a river/lake/sea knows that all the small pieces of trash on land end up in the water.

<comment><USER64> Yes, but "in the water" includes both shallow water near shore and deep water far out in the ocean. The OP is about one. You're talking about the other, which might not even be relevant, so the "anyone knows" condescension is misplaced.

<comment><USER43> What do you mean might not even be relevant?

Is there some hidden reason we should be focusing on deep sea plastics only?

<comment><USER64> It's not hidden. It's what the OP is about. It's right there in the title - _ocean_ plastic waste, not coastal. Pollution on or near shore is _absolutely_ an important issue, but there are thousands of important issues that are not germane to _this_ conversation.

<comment><USER43> I'm pretty sure the plastic coastal waste we're talking about it still in the ocean, so I'm a bit confused by the distinction you're making.

Care to explain more?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why won't US Companies hire remote Canadians? - <AUTHOR> For the 10 years I've been on hacker news and this is the first time I felt compelled to ask a question.
I see tons of remote full-time jobs especially on StackOverflow in the US for 100-120K USD which to a remoting Canadian is an insantity and never once will I get a reply. If its a contract job then yes I'll get a response, or if its Canadian company I always get a response but a US startup wants US only employees. The Canadian salary wage for programmers is paltry especially for remoting. It sits between 55K-70K CAD. I regret not moving to San Francisco years ago and the only way to get a fair wage was to go self-employeed and load up on 4-5 contracts a time and now you're running a business. Its not even hard to hire a Canadian since you can just contract them out.
How can you get US companies to consider hiring a remote Canadian? There must be a way to hack this. <comment><USER2> In order to be employed by a USA company the employer needs to file several forms for federal and state taxation, insurance, etc. These forms require a SSN and relevant authorisation to work in the USA. I fail to see how living in Canada and not holding the appropriate permits that any employer would want to go through all the trouble of hiring you.

As you have found, contracting is probably your only option if you want to work for USA companies and even then you might benefit from incorporating in a suitable USA jurisdiction.

In my experience, the amount you are paid generally reflects the cost of living where you work. Although you might earn far more in SV or SF, your living costs will also be much higher. In the long-term you might not have been able to save any more money.

</comment><comment><USER3> Open a US corporation that you invoice under so you are tax compliant. American money laundering restriction processes are onerous and add all manner of hassles to US companies paying foreigners. All the usual deductions have to be held back and remitted in strange ways that most are not familiar with. This means the company registers with the IRS and gets it's compliance account then pays you and you get aware of all these deductions, and pay them. There is a tax treaty so you are only taxed once.

<comment><USER4> But invoicing through a corporation could only get him contracting work, not a full-time job.

<comment><USER3> Now he has nothing, if he gets hired as a contractor he may be able to prove his chops and escalate to a foreign hire and show their payroll dept the procedures to follow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Any hack of employment and taxation laws is likely to be illegal.

What are you offering an USA company that would make it worthwhile for them to break the law(s) ?</comment>


Merry Christmas Free 4K Wallpapers for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingepiphany.com/2014/12/25/merry-christmas-free-4k-wallpapers-everyone/ <comment><USER2> Nice, but you should avoid JPG for hq images (look at the "logos", they are kinda blurry) Merry christmas!</comment>


We Reduce your cloud bill, or we pay you! - <AUTHOR> Folks,<p>Do you think you are spending too much cash on cloud service? We are a startup which helps you optimize cloud infrastructure. The caveat is the fact that if we aren't able to bring down your cost of infrastructure, we have a cash back policy on the savings. ;) <comment><USER2> Sure, if you think you can honestly save people enough money quickly enough to make it worth paying you enough, compared to working a more traditional job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good. Wanna give it a try? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish you luck, but the cloud economics problem generally goes far beyond "the number is too high."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but I don't get your comment "the number is too high"</comment></comment>